The Mixed Reality Toolkit with Catherine Diaz
What if you could build a mixed reality app once, and run it on all kinds of different VR and AR headsets? Carl and Richard talk to Catherina Diaz about the Mixed Reality Toolkit (MRTK) on GitHub, which offers up a cross-platform deployment of VR/AR applications. Catherine talks about how MRTK abstracts the visualizations and interactions across different devices, including implementations for Hololens, Oculus, Vive, the Windows VR headsets, and even mobile devices! The conversation also dives into how VR and AR evolving, mapping existing user interface metaphors into the 3D realm, and also ideas on what pure VR/AR interfaces could be like!
Guests:
Catherine Diaz
Catherine Diaz is a software engineer at Microsoft. She graduated with a BS in Computer Science from the University of Colorado at Boulder. During her undergrad, she worked as a research assistant for Dr. Daniel Szafir in the Interactive Robotics and Novel Technologies Lab (IRON Lab), specifically looking into depth perception in augmented reality. She also continued to grow her experience in the AR industry with internships at Disney/ESPN, Apple and now works on Microsoft’s Mixed Reality Toolkit (MRTK).
Links:
- NextDoor https://nextdoor.com/
- Low Code API https://github.com/carlfranklin/LowCodeAPI
- Mixed Reality Toolkit https://github.com/microsoft/MixedRealityToolkit-Unity
- Hololens https://www.microsoft.com/hololens
- Unity https://unity.com/
- Altspace VR https://altvr.com/
- RiftSketch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=db-7J5OaSag
- HP Reverb G2 https://www.hp.com/us-en/vr/reverb-g2-vr-headset.html
- Oculus Quest https://www.oculus.com/quest/
- Keyboard in VR https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrQhxol7rPw&t=190s